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Like Half the National Gallery in Your Backyard

Mitchell and Emily Rales in front of Richard Serra’s “Sylvester.”Credit
Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Potomac, Md. — Tucked behind a winding road dotted with McMansions are 200 acres of bucolic walking paths and woodlands. There are sculptures too, by artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra and Jeff Koons along with a man-made pond and, nestled beside it, a Modernist limestone building that houses a small contemporary art museum. This is Glenstone, the creation of Mitchell P. Rales, 56, the intensely private Washington industrialist and his wife, Emily, 36. Although it is only some 15 miles from downtown Washington, in the seven years it’s been open — three days a week, by appointment only — no more than 10,000 people have visited their eye-popping collection of contemporary art.

That figure is expected to multiply by a factor of 10. Plans are in the works for a major expansion that is said to be costing the couple upward of $125 million. Once it is completed in 2016, this enclave will become a more public place in which to see art and learn about architecture as well as the environment.

A three-minute stroll from the sleek 25,000-square-foot museum by Charles Gwathmey, the New York architect who died in 2009, will be a second museum, five times as big — the rough equivalent of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. Designed by Tom Phifer, another New York architect, it will feature a series of interconnecting pavilions for permanent installations, each devoted to a single artist, as well as a large gallery for special exhibitions. (The original museum building will also hold rotating shows.)

Plans also call for a new entrance similar to that of a national park, with a Japanese cedar entrance pavilion. Peter Walker, a Berkeley-based landscape architect, is planting more than 5,000 trees from 40 native species and creating a sustainable meadow along with a flowering water garden. “We’re out to create something different,” Mr. Rales said.

Back in America’s Gilded Age, robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick created world-class art collections intended to be shared with the public. Recently the new rich have been establishing countless art foundations with galleries that have visiting hours. Some are scrappy warehouse spaces; others are slicker, designer buildings. And while many have become respected havens to see new art, others are considered vanity projects designed to telegraph the creator’s wealth and taste while at the same time providing a generous tax shelter.

Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where Mr. Rales is a trustee, called Glenstone “a serious vision,” where the public will be able to see “one of the most important collections of postwar art.”

Many in the art world believe there’s a place for projects like Glenstone.

“This is not a rich man’s toy,” said James Cuno, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, who has been to the museum. “The Rales are serious. This will be a sylvan experience like the old Barnes Foundation or the Getty Villa. In the greater ecology of museums, Glenstone provides a place to see great art on an intimate scale in a way large museums simply can’t.”

Sitting in his office off the main gallery of the Gwathmey building late last month, Mr. Rales said, deadpan: “I don’t want to be the richest guy in the cemetery. This is a 25-year journey.”

Listening to the Rales talk about the creation of Glenstone is a bit like hearing two Harvard M.B.A.s discuss how they built a Fortune 500 company. “We’ve been very deliberate,” Mr. Rales said. “We wrote a strategic plan; we did a lot of research. You can bring a business sensibility to the equation.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Neighbors have accused the couple of buying up adjacent land to develop it (which they deny), and voiced environmental concerns when they applied for permission to hook up to the county’s sewer system. Critics have called the museum unwelcoming and exclusionary. When its expansion is complete, Glenstone will be open five days a week and admission will continue to be free. But reservations will still be required because the Rales want to make sure Glenstone is never overcrowded, they said.

The Rales are so passionate about creating an inviting atmosphere that the couple commissioned studies to examine just how much room people need to look at art comfortably. They estimate 30 square feet a person: 10 square feet for personal space, 10 for the artwork itself and 10 for the vista to the artwork. A blockbuster exhibition at a major museum may leave visitors with only 10 to 15 square feet.

“When I went to the Reina Sofia in Madrid a few years ago and saw ‘Guernica,’ ” Mr. Rales said, referring to Picasso’s celebrated painting, “I was there for 30 minutes, until the guards told me to move on. I wanted to stay longer. Visitors who come here will be able to spend as long as they want in front of a picture or an object.”

Mr. Rales, who grew up in Washington, founded the Danaher Corporation with his brother Steven in 1984. A science and technology firm named after their favorite Montana trout-fishing stream, it has grown into a publicly traded company valued at $40 billion.

Like many other billionaires, Mr. Rales dipped his toes in the art world slowly. In 1986 he bought a former hunt club in Montgomery County, which became Glenstone. Then he built a home there. To fill the empty walls, he began to buy art. First came a Mary Cassatt painting, then a Matisse drawing and a Picasso portrait. But it was more decorating than collecting.

“Soon I started going to museums and galleries, and read a lot of books about art history,” he said, discovering Abstract Expressionism. That these artists were “thinking outside the box,” he said, was something he could relate to.

Photo

Thomas Phifer’s design proposes a cluster of interlocked pavilions for the expansion of Glenstone, the art collection of Mitchell and Emily Rales in Potomac, Md.

“I liken it to the way my brother and I were first perceived in the business world,” he said. “Back in the 1940s and ‘50s artists like de Kooning and Pollock were considered outcasts and revolutionaries. My brother and I were seen as two upstarts in a world of older C.E.O.’s.”

Around the same time, in the early 1990s, he met Robert Mnuchin, a New York art dealer and former partner at Goldman Sachs. “We were so lucky,” Mr. Rales said. “When the market crashed a lot became available.” That’s when he started buying works by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and Yves Klein.

In 1998, Mr. Rales had a life-changing experience. While salmon fishing with some friends in Russia, the helicopter they had chartered stopped in a village to refuel. There, a plane blew up.

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“We were 10 feet away,” he recalled. “Flames shot more than two stories high. I was lucky to have escaped. I left Russia barefoot with only a torn T-shirt and gym shorts. From then on it was no longer about making money.”

That’s when the idea for Glenstone — named because it is on Glen Road and there are stone quarries nearby — began to percolate. That’s also when he met Matthew Marks, the Chelsea dealer. “Matthew was a young guy trying to forge his destiny and we hit it off,” he said. It was through Mr. Marks that he met and began collecting artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and Charles Ray.

“Right now we have 800 works in our collection and that will double over our lifetime,” he said, explaining why he decided to build a second museum.” I don’t want anything buried in cellars.” The collection not only includes paintings by masters like de Kooning and Pollock, Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg, but also by younger artists like Christopher Wool, Charles Ray and Robert Gober.

But Ms. Rales said: “We won’t buy an artist unless he or she has been working for 15 years. It gives us a fighting chance to see a large enough body of work to assess whether that artist belongs here.”

Mr. Marks, who has worked with many of today’s biggest collectors, said of the Rales: “I’ve never known a couple who are so thorough. Normally people wait for the auction catalogs or buy from gallery shows. But Mitch and Emily decide what they want and then research it.”

If they are after a work from, say, a particular series by an artist, they will find out where every example is and often approach the owners to see if they would consider a sale. “We’re patient,” Ms. Rales said. “If someone says ‘not today,’ we’ll wait. We recently bought something that we waited seven years to get.”

The couple, who married in 2008, work very much as a team. Mr. Rales brings a boundless curiosity and sharp business instincts. The elegant and self-assured Ms. Rales, a former curator and dealer, is more the tastemaker, devoting herself full time to Glenstone as its director.

Ms. Rales is more adventurous than her husband. “We both have veto power,” she said. “But over the years I’ve pushed him to be a bit more daring, to embrace more conceptual works by artists that I’ve admired.” On May 9, they will open a survey show of the Swiss artist-duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss that will include videos.

Before Mr. Phifer, the architect, began designing the new building, he used a stack of about 80 flash cards or “inspiration boards,” as he called them, to get a sense of the Rales’s tastes and vision. There were pictures of Shaker villages and ancient art, rock gardens and a floor sculpture by Carl Andre.

He came up with a cluster of interlocking pavilions fashioned from stacked blocks of cast concrete nestled around a Japanese-style water garden. Among the artists whose work will occupy their own pavilions are Mr. Marden, Mr. Ray, Michael Heizer and Cy Twombly.

“All the rooms will be day lit,” Mr. Phifer said. “It was very important to have the experience be all about nature.”

Education is a priority, too. The couple contacted the county school system to see what was missing from its arts curriculum. Learning that there was little money for field trips, the Rales agreed to pay the transportation for schools, whose students will learn about the environment too.

A version of this article appears in print on April 21, 2013, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Like Half the National Gallery in Your Backyard. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe